I particularly enjoy reading from the Communities Dominate Brands to see where the cell phone market is going. He's been pretty much spot on in regards to Nokia and predicted that Microsoft would do cut to the Lumia brand which is part of today's headlines on/.

substance2003 writes: Microsoft spoke person Alexandre Pavelgotchavisky said in a statement We are pleased to announce the return of Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant in a forthcoming update to Office 365.

Microsoft made a presentation showing the new Clippy features using updated and gritty looking graphics and enhancing the experience of interaction by using Cortana voice features making it possible for Clippy to actually talk to people in a way that was never possible before. This developement prompted the company to bring back the feature.

Mr Pavelgotchavisky mentioned how his division kept getting asked What happened to Clippy? on an almost daily basis and even went so far as to call Clippy The most beloved character Microsoft ever created.

One technology reviewer who assisted the demonstration was more skeptical of this new Clippy mentioning how the Mickey Mouse style voice might seems like a good idea for kids but would put off business users who just want to have a normal adult conversation.

I guess Quebec bashing from the rest of the country is to be expected in news like those.

Well like it or now, Quebec bring a shit lot of stuff and specialization for Canada that isn't to look down (aerospace, hydroelectricity and videogame to name a few). Furthermore, I don't know in what world you live but I don't see how speaking a different language is in any way related in actual capabilities or skill.

Humm, let's see. Hydro Quebec gets 80% of it's current revenu from Quebecers and constantly demanding increases of 4 to 5% per years while making record profits. So while it makes a lot of money, it's not doing it from what it sells to the US because it has to sell there at a lost and subsidize to companies who threaten to leave the province.

Aerospace? Bombardier is cuttings a lot of jobs of late because of poor decisions and I got a friend working there who is currently quite nervous of loosing his post.

Videogames? You mean that sector being subsidized by the provincial government who decided to cut the amount to smaller studios who in some cases are looking to move to Ontario because the tax credits there are better? The same Ontario where most of the big studios who have offices in Montreal also have them in Toronto? Without those tax credits I promise you the video game industry would leave in a heart beat because it's not hard to move that sort of company around.

And for those who don't know much about Quebec, I am being sarcastic. Quebec needs to stop putting itself into deficit year after year before it gets to a point where we get imposed stuff like they are doing in Greece because I promise you, there isn't a politician alive here with the backbone to refuse to pay the creditors and put it's population 1st.

Having heard too many stories of gambling addicts loosing everything in Casinos and even seeing it happen to my own father. I might have gotten behind the idea of blocking gambling websites if they blocked all of them period. But since Loto-Quebec will be making it so that people go to their online site instead it's not a move to help reduce the risk. Just making sure our own provincially hungry fox guards the hen house. People will still loose their shirts in the end and we'll still have these establishment who end up putting people in poverty which I find is only a short term boost to the provincial revenue for a long term lost.

I'm not even certain it's a good thing for Loto-Quebec since it would open the door to other provinces and countries blocking access to Quebec gambling sites. Who knows where this could end up? Once you start blocking one group of sites, you could start blocking other groups too.

In the end, I don't think it will be seen as legal. Someone will surely challenge this all the way to the supreme court.

Wasn't there a bunch of articles lately explaining how much of these app developers aren't making any return because of how difficult it is to be seen on the store or how most users don't really use much of these apps once the hype passes.

Why wouldn't it be different? Most of the open source projects where there was a major disagreement ended up with a fork.
Just think of the Open Office when Oracle was just letting it die. People just went and did Libre Office when they were ignored.
There's no reason to think that the folks over at Debian couldn't just create their own fork if they felt they were being ignored.
If that were to happen, it would then all come down to how many Debian users move over vs who stays.
That being said, I'd rather they all come to a consensus that everyone could be happy with.

Let's say a US show like Sleepy Hollow from Fox is playing for instance.
I'm only thinking of that one as it's totally being bombarded on me as part of the fall lineup at the moment and know which station in the US plays it.
Now, Global TV in Canada has the rights to play that same show in Canada and is doing so at the same time.
Well what would be the point of paying for ads on Global if everyone is watching the US feed via cable and satellite?
So the solution is to have the Global TV feed play which is playing simultaneously to FOX replace the feed from the FOX channel and insure we see those commercials targeting Canadians. At least that's what I was noticing when I had cable. I believe there is talk about changing that.

I think he means that Over the air (OTA) broadcast is a pure uncompressed signal of HDTV 1080i quality. The cable company has to compress the signal to get so many channels to get to the subscriber. Some feel there is a loss in quality vs OTA but depending on who you talk to it's not something people will notice.

What are the advantages to using this increasingly slow and bloated fork of the internet's favorite database platform?

Mind giving examples showing this to be true? This is the 1st I'm hearing about this although I don't follow it all the time. I'm just curious about how MariaDB could be so slow considering that the founders of MySQL are working on that version now.

As a resident of Quebec. I take offence to what you say. I don't call you an asshole if you're government is doing stupid things (which I'll bet they do) so leave the general folks in Quebec alone and keep you're complaints focused on the provincial government of Quebec or the federal government of Canada for letting the provincial one get away with it.